Europe

We are prone to think that Russia, throughout modern European history, stood as the gate between Europe and Asia, the West and the East. Russia has represented otherness, inferiority and underdevelopment, and probably provided Europeans with a first pattern of backwardness against which they could measure their own civilizational achievements.

However, “east” and “west” (and “western”) were merely spatial concepts in eighteenth-century geography, devoid of specific political or cultural connotations. Nonetheless, it was the case for the Europeans, for whom ”Europe” and ”European” were synonymous with cultural, economic, political, technological advance and superiority, and more broadly, with the whole process called modernity. The representations of the East, by contrast, were more blurred and ambiguous. On the one hand, the East was seen as cruel, uncivilised and underdeveloped. On the other hand, it looked attractive because of its aura of mystery, and its flow of luxury items. Moreover, one must not forget that the Biblical Eden was situated in the East.

Further, the shift from a three-continent system (Europe, Asia, Africa) to a four-continent system (Europe, Asia, Africa, and America) after the discovery of America has been problematic for the Enlightenment geography which was based on a division of the globe in two continents (in modern terms “tectonic plates”): the Eastern and the Western continents, that is, Europe, Asia and Africa located on the former, and America on the latter. This division corresponded to the contrast between “The Old World” and “The New World”, which was an elementary part of the new Newtonian, scientific geography. Thus, Europe, Asia and Africa were situated in the geographical “east” rather than the geographical “west”.

The eighteenth-century globe was divided into the Eastern and Western Continents in William Guthrie A New Geographical, Historical and Commercial Grammar, 1799 (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online ECCO, Gale).

The Russian Empire

Russia and the Russians were characterised and depicted through European standards. For example, the Orthodox religion was seen as the Catholic religion without the pope, while Russian workers were held to be as good as Scotsmen, strong and robust. Nonetheless, from the European perspective, Russia was not only perceived as inferior; it had rich natural sources, commercial connections with the East, and excellent water routes (rivers) for this purpose, as well as good development prospects.

Even though Russia and Europe were located on the same continent, Russia was culturally different from the other countries of the continent, especially France and Britain. One indication of this was the poor status of Russian women. The stereotypical depiction of Russians as binge vodka drinkers was a commonplace, and even the number of vodka shops were recorded in the entries on Russia in geography books of the time. Russia, and especially Russian environment and nature were described as more “Nordic” than “Eastern” part of the Continent, snowy and cold.

Compared with the other European empires (especially Britain, France and Spain), the Russian Empire was a massive landmass. Europeans subdivided it into large parts, European Russia and Asian Russia in Asia, and smaller units, like Moscovite Russia and Tartary. Before the emergence of ethnographic research in the late Enlightenment, a couple of Russian minorities were mentioned, but the distinctions between various minorities living in Russia and between these and the Russians were not explained. Usually minorities were simply named ”Tartars”.

The map of the Russian Empire in Atlas to Guthrie’s System of Geography, 1800 (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, ECCO, Gale). Russia was generally pictured in two separate maps of Russia in Europe and Russia in Asia, but in this map the vast empire is pictured in one map.

Russians had not always been “Russians”. Although geography and history were distinct areas of scientific knowledge in the eighteenth-century, historical details were recorded in the geography books. Since the origin and history of nations was a crucial element of nationhood (not yet nationalism), it was important to explain the origins of geographical terms and names. For instance, several different origins, each bearing a different connotation, were attributed to the name “Europe”. Similarly, it was assumed that ‘Russia’ originated either from russus, meaning a dispersant, and a wanderer, or from the ancient Croatian Prince Russus.

According to the Russians’ historical narrative, the conquered Russians had become the conquerors. The heart of real Russia had been Moscow, and it still was, despite the fact that Peter the Great founded a new capital, St Petersburg. By contrast, official modern historical narratives tell that (Orthodox) Russia originated from Kievian Russia, but according to the eighteenth-century geography, Kiev had been, and remained, the Russia of the Cossacks, rather than the cradle of Russia.

Russia, the largest empire in the world in spatial terms in the 18th century, if it not appeared entirely strange, certainly looked very different from (other parts of) Europe according to British Enlightenment geography, on the cultural level no less than in its geographical setting.

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The author has a PhD in social sciences (political science) at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests include the Scottish Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century geography and the conceptual history of politics. She is currently preparing a research project on critique of democracy. This text is based on the author’s article ‘Russia and the Euro-Centric Geography During the British Enlightenment’ in the special issue on the Nordic Enlightenment in Transcultural Studies (Brill) 2018(2), 150–170.

I started my study of European nationalisms by looking at the period when nations were busy creating themselves. The time was the second half of the 19th century, and the place the Finnish Grand-Duchy where a conflict between the aspiring commoner intelligentsia and the declining nobility had emerged.

During that time, nationalism as an ethno-linguistic-cultural project was particularly popular among the minority nations of the four multinational empires – the Russian (of which Finland was a part), Prussian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman – making up the eastern half of Europe. By the end of the century, progressive nationalists promoted democratic politics, meritocratic principle in recruiting bureaucrats, educational reform, social and gender equality, and land reform.

To justify the takeover of governance by popular forces, the commoner stratum created a powerful enemy image. The nobility were presented as the enemy of the People, Equality, Peace, and Progress – a parasite class of supranational aristocracy, clinging to royal traditions, exploiting peasantry, leading men to war, growing fat on taxes and forbidding female emancipation, particularly the marriages of their daughters to commoner men. My dissertation, titled An imagined nobleman: Nobility as an enemy image and in-group identity in nineteenth-century Finland(transl. from Finnish) dealt with the story of this mainly print-media-borne battle, but considering the viewpoints of both sides.

After WWI, the former separatist minorities emerged from under the collapsed empires as independent nation-states, most with republican constitutions. However, the great Western narrative of emancipatory small-state nationalism soon landed on its belly, swamped by the hard-core nationalistic, military ambitions that led to WWII. The ensuing division into two Blocs eventually came to an end, and, by the millennium, Francis Fukuyama had tentatively declared the End of History, while Samuel Huntington prophesied a Clash of Civilisations.

In the 2010s, nationalistic strivings are back with a vengeance. For a historian of political conflicts, enemy images and aggressive rhetoric, things seems to have returned rather to business as usual.

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The author is a PhD (Social sciences), and acts as a researcher at the Department of Political and Economic studies, University of Helsinki. Her current project focuses on Finnish hate speech throughout the ages. Her other research interests range from the ideological trends within the 21st century neo-nationalist far right to the local cultural history of her native town of Lappeenranta.

My View of the West is a series of short posts by members of The West Network about their research or perspectives of ‘the West’.